Columbia University professor of humanities Mark Lilla has, in the Wall Street Journal, a thoughtful and articulate examination of the decline of intellectual conservatism… all the more thoughtful because of his admitted liberalism. That handicap aside, Professor Lilla does a very good job summing up the waning of the conservative thinking class – William F. Buckley, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Richard Brookhiser, Norman Podhoretz – and its replacement with idiots – Sarah Palin, Bill O’Reilly, etc. The quality of national debate, Professor Lilla writes, has suffered accordingly and so have Americans, liberal and conservative alike.

The Dartmouth Rugby Football Club downed the University of Pennsylvania last weekend, at Penn, by a final tally of 78-7. The match was the first of the Ivy season for the DRFC, which also notched a 38-7 victory in a B-side match played later that day.

The next day saw Dartmouth in Princeton, New Jersey, rolling over the Tigers 52-3 amidst strong play by back Will Lehmann ’12 and DRFC co-captain Tommy Brothers ’11.

This past Saturday, Dartmouth took the pitch in New Haven, set to play the Bulldogs at Yale. Match reports aren’t yet in but Yale came into the came with a 2-0 record, similar to Dartmouth’s, after downing Ivy rivals Columbia and Cornell. Details forthcoming.

With the recent advent of collegiate rugby’s fall season, campus pitches across the country are once again alive with rucks, mauls, and scrums. One of the more lively is Sachem Field in Hanover, New Hampshire, home pitch to defending Ivy League title-holders the Dartmouth Rugby Football Club.

Fresh off a first-place finish in New England’s pre-season Granite Cup, an invitational tournament of squads from New Hampshire, Vermont, and Canada, Dartmouth opened its regular season this weekend with two matches against Columbia University, at Columbia. It won both by considerable margins, notching an 80-0 shutout in the second.

The Dartmouth Rugby Football Club.

“We moved the ball well and had good things come of that… It was a good weekend for us,” noted Dartmouth co-captain Sam Edandison ’10, “Columbia had a big and physical side. We didn’t match their physicality to the extent that we could and that is something we will work on.”

The DRFC is set to play its first home match against Yale University Saturday, September 26. This weekend’s wins make Dartmouth 2-0 in regular season play, outscoring opponents by a total of 171-3.

Dartmouth has won eight of the last 11 Ivy League championships and has won 13 New England championships and appeared in 12 national championships. It is the oldest continuously-touring collegiate rugby program in America.

This year’s Ivy League men’s golf title goes, for the second year straight, to Columbia University, despite the odds: the golfing Lions have no home course to practice on, making do instead with a simulator in a converted squash court. When feasible, the team rides a bus to a club outside New York City. Conversely, Ivy rival Cornell practices on a Robert Trent Jones course, while Yale’s was designed by Charles Blair Macdonald (the “father of American golf-course architecture”). Princeton practices on a private club near its campus, and Dartmouth (being Dartmouth) flat-out owns the idyllic Hanover Country Club.